Surge: Pakistan

Surge is an exploration the evolving relationship between art practice, documentary tropes and citizenship in Pakistan. The issue speculates a renewed understanding of the future of photo-practice withina country that has witnessed a swiftly evolving ‘state’, leading to a range of activity around personal expressionand social awareness. With an eye to history, as well asto the contemporary, the issue features an assortment of submissions in order to embrace the present surfeitof visuals and works that reconstruct an understanding of image-based practices in Pakistan, acknowledging ‘difference’ and ‘diversity’ as a means ofcreative departure, striving to unhinge stereotypes often created through pictures in the public domain.

With support from

EDITORIAL

Photography in Pakistan has been used in modern times primarily as a photojournalistic medium, although the visual documentation of its living folk traditions, landscapes and monuments has occupied photographers since its early history. As an artform however, photography began to emerge only in...

As photographers in Pakistan today, we are fortunate given the steady growth of the profession but shoulder great responsibility while standing at a cross-roads or a “half line” of a moment in the evolution of the arts, and photography as an integral part of it. Many young and dynamic voices...

Where literacy became rule, the scribe disappeared.
–John Szarkowski
Suspended in mid-air in an apartment somewhere in Lahore, a couple languorously floats towards one another, composed in the same manner as an oil painting made by Marc Chagall, originally titled Birthday (1915)....

How many books, articles and manuals are supposed to give us the answer to ‘what makes a good photograph’? More often than not, practitioners seem to have chosen the ‘decisive moment’ as their motto, sometimes without really being aware of it. A large part of the work produced today in...

The portrait, whether painted by an artist or shot by a photographer, has always been an effort to momentarily capture in that instant; more than what meets the eye. The act of making the portrait – the interaction that precedes the final image captured on film – is a calculated attempt...

You’re at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart. – Franz Kafka
If the world were made into a movie, Pakistan would likely play the character of someone that is full of soul but who is greatly misunderstood. An actor with all the conventional characteristics of being...